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Volkswagen wants to make sure people are aware of just how versatile their forthcoming MEB platform, which will prove the base for all of its all-electric I.D. vehicles, really is. The MEB-based I.D. R Pikes Pace, a prototype all-electric race car, will take on the famous Pikes Peak hillclimb in June in Colorado to help make the point.

The race car has four-wheel drive, powered by its fully electric powertrain, and it’s part of a collaboration between Volkswagen’s R tuning brand and their Motorsport division, along with the I.D. team driving the automaker’s electro mobility efforts.

The I.D. R Pikes Peak will take on its namesake track, a 12.4 meter run that starts at elevation of 9,000 feet, and climbs to a final height of 14,115 by race end. VW’s last attempt at the race was in 1987 using a dual-engine Golf, which actually didn’t complete the route.

Pikes Peak happens June 24 just outside of Colorado Springs, and should prove an interesting demonstration of Volkswagen’s electric platform.

No 10 very concerned over Facebook data breach by Cambridge Analytica

Downing Street expressed its concern for the Facebook data breach that affected tens of millions of people involving the analytics company that worked with Donald Trump’s campaign team.

No 10 weighed in on the row as the social network saw almost $20bn (£14bn) wiped off its market cap in the first few minutes of trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange, where Facebook opened down more than 3%.

Pockit Loqbox promises to help the UK’s ‘unbanked’ improve their credit score

Building up your credit history or improving your credit score often presents somewhat of a catch-22 situation. You’ll need to take out some form of credit to do so, such as a loan or credit card, but if your score is too low or your history too chequered, you’ll typically be offered a very bad deal, or no credit at all. In financial services, the cash-poor are always asked to pay the most.

The new credit builder product enables Pockit customers to build their credit history through their Pockit current account by simply setting aside a fixed recurring contribution each month. These contributions are then reported to credit reference agencies as proof of an individual’s ability to maintain a consistent credit commitment over a period of time, sans overpriced credit card or high interest loan. In that sense, this is more akin to regularly saving but in a way that is recorded in your credit file.

Here’s how it works: You first decide how much you want to contribute each month, and purchase a Pockit Loqbox voucher worth 12 times your monthly contribution. There’s also a one-off set-up cost of £9.99. The startup then collects the monthly contributions automatically each month and you effectively pay off your Loqbox. Crucially, payments are reported as loan repayments to the three main U.K. credit reference agencies, and when the year is up, the full amount is returned. If for any reason these payments become unmanageable, you can exit early with no penalties.

In an email exchange, I put it to Pockit founder Virraj Jatania that the product would serve its target customer even better if the fintech startup had found a way to offer it for free, since you are still having to pay to improve your score, albeit not via interest on a loan or other form of credit. Pockit also charges 99p per transaction, so you have to factor in these too. He said that wasn’t possible because there are fixed costs, including involving multiple partners, that can’t be got around completely. However, Jatania makes a strong argument that the product is still good value for those who will benefit from it the most.

“The poverty premium of being unbanked or financially underserved is c.£1,300 per year, and a great deal of this comes from not being able to pay utility bills by direct debit or getting sucked into predatory loans (doorstep lenders, etc.),” he told me. “We believe by providing this product, it will help them save in a huge way on the poverty premium. In fact, we will use the data from the credit builder to help them get fairly priced loans”.

One other issue with a credit builder product like this is that credit scores are a black box: it’s not always clear what will or won’t affect your rating and by how much. This makes it hard to assess if the total cost of taking out a Pockit Loqbox will be worth it once the 12 months is up. “We feel the pricing we are offering is fair and will have a meaningful impact,” counters Jatania. “So much so that we are going to offer customers a money back guarantee if they have not seen their score improve as long as they haven’t defaulted on a loan elsewhere out of our control”.

Source: TECH CRUNCH

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React State From the Ground Up

As you begin to learn React, you will be faced with understanding what state is. State is hugely important in React, and perhaps a big reason you’ve looked into using React in the first place. Let’s take a stab at understanding what state is and how it works.

What is State?

State, in React, is a plain JavaScript object that allows you keep track of a component’s data. The state of a component can change. A change to the state of a component depends on the functionality of the application. Changes can be based on user response, new messages from server-side, network response, or anything.

Component state is expected to be private to the component and controlled by the same component. To make changes to a component’s state, you have to make them inside the component — the initialization and updating of the component’s state.

Class Components

States is only available to components that are called class components. The main reason why you will want to use class components over their counterpart, functional components, is that class components can have state. Let’s see the difference. Functional components are JavaScript functions, like this:

const App = (props) => {
return (
<div>
{ this.props }
</div>
)
}

If the functionality you need from your component is as simple as the one above, then a functional component is the perfect fit. A class component will look a lot more complex than that.

Above, I am setting the state of the component’s username to a string.

The Constructor

According to the official documentation, the constructor is the right place to initialize state. Initializing state is done by setting this.state to an object, like you can see above. Remember: state is a plain JavaScript object. The initial state of the App component has been set to a state object which contains the key username, and its value johndoe using this.state = { username: 'johndoe' }.

Initializing a component state can get as complex as what you can see here:

The difference is that I extracted the username from state in the first example, but it can also be written as const status = this.state.username. Thanks to ES6 destructuring, I do not have to go that route. Do not get confused when you see things like this. It is important to know that I am not reassigning state when I did that. The initial setup of state was done in the constructor, and should not be done again – never update your component state directly.

A state can be accessed using this.state.property-name. Do not forget that aside from the point where you initialized your state, the next time you are to make use of this.state is when you want to access the state.

Updating State

The only permissible way to update a component’s state is by using setState(). Let’s see how this works practically.

First, I will start with creating the method that gets called to update the component’s username. This method should receive an argument, and it is expected to use that argument to update the state.

handleInputChange(username) {
this.setState({username})
}

Once again, you can see that I am passing in an object to setState(). With that done, I will need to pass this function to the event handler that gets called when the value of an input box is changed. The event handler will give the context of the event that was triggered which makes it possible to obtain the value entered in the input box using event.target.value. This is the argument passed to handleInputChange() method. So, the render method should look like this.

Passing State as Props

A state can be passed as props from a parent to the child component. To see this in action, let’s create a new component for creating a To Do List. This component will have an input field to enter daily tasks and the tasks will be passed as props to the child component.

Try to create the parent component on your own, using the lessons you have learned thus far.

Each time a new item is entered and the submit button is clicked, the method handleSubmit gets called. This method will be used to update the state of the component. The way I want to update it is by using concat to add the new value in the todoList array. Doing so will set the value for todoList inside the setState() method. Here’s how that should look:

The event context is obtained each time the submit button is clicked. We use event.preventDefault() to stop the default action of submission which would reload the page. The value entered in the input field is assigned a variable called value, which is then passed an argument when todoList.concat() is called. React updates the state of todoList by adding the new value to the initial empty array. This new array becomes the current state of todoList. When another item is added, the cycle repeats.

The goal here is to pass the individual item to a child component as props. For this tutorial, we’ll call it the TodoItem component. Add the code snippet below inside the parent div which you have in render() method.

You’re using map to loop through the todoList array, which means the individual item is then passed to the TodoItem component as props. To make use of this, you need to have a TodoItem component that receives props and renders it on the DOM. I will show you how to do this using functional and class components.

If there is no need to manage state in this component, you are better off using functional component.

Leveling Up

You will be handling state very often while developing React application. With all the areas covered above, you should have the confidence of being able to dive into the advanced part of state management in React. To dig deeper, I recommend React’s official documentation on State and Lifecycle as well as Uber’s React Guide on Props vs State.

Nazare Typeface Design by Natanael Gama

It all started with a Portuguese soap packaging from the first half of the 20th Century. The 5 uppercase letters that spell NAZARÉ were sufficient to drive the creation of this typeface design. Created by Natanael Gama, Nazaré fits in a semi-serif category and has a large contrast. It works outstandingly in display use specially in the bolder weights that have even more contrast. The regular weights have a more moderate contrast and an overall less extravagant design, fitting best in the typographical conventions. This provides a better render in text use.

You can use this font in large headlines, logos, posters, book covers, and general display use as well as short strings of text.

Nazaré is the name of a small Portuguese fishing village known for its giant waves and peculiar people.

These glaring illustrations were crafted by the half Nazarene himself, and brilliant artist, Lorde Mantraste

Typeface design

Webflow Ecommerce

Even with $2 for shipping, that’s the lowest price you’ll find anywhere for these concert-friendly hearing-savers. Plus: a killer deal on a family-favorite movie and unlimited massages for $37.
Source: CNET

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10 Presentation Tools to Win Over Your Audience

PowerPoint is one of the most popular presentation tools. However, it lacks interactive features, without which your presentation might become boring enough to lead people to boredom. Well,…

Visit hongkiat.com for full content.
Source: HONGKIAT

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HTC’s Vive Pro headset will retail for a steep $799, and that doesn’t even include controllers

The top widely-available VR headset that money can buy is… gonna take a lot of money to buy.

HTC has released pricing info for its Vive Pro headset that the company showed off at CES and it ain’t cheap. The company had previously detailed that they would begin selling the system as a headset-only package for customers looking to upgrade. The price for that headset is going to be a very steep $799, a price that might have made sense in 2016, but sits far above what other comparable headsets on the market are retailing for now.

Pre-orders for the headset start today and will begin shipping out on April 5. Vive Pro headsets ordered before June 3 will come with 6 months of HTC’s Viveport VR subscription service.

More positively, the company is knocking another $100 off of the price of the regular non-Pro Vive, which will now retail for $499 will all the fixings. This is much more competitive price to meet Oculus’s aggressive $399 price point for the Rift. While the Vive may not be $200 better than the Rift, for people with the available space to take full advantage of SteamVR tracking, I’d say it definitely could be worth an extra $100.

HTC is clearly in a rough position as a company, and it’s going to have to be pretty aggressive in order to stay competitive in the VR space. This really just doesn’t seem to do it in my opinion. It’s likely that when the full package (w/ sensors and controllers) comes out later this year, HTC could likely be charging at least $999 for it, a price that might be fine for enterprise customers, but doubles the price of the most comparable complete VR system, the Samsung Odyssey.

While Samsung’s headset sports the same dual 1440×1600 OLED screens as the Vive Pro, the HTC headset will utilize Valve’s latest SteamVR tracking system while the Odyssey uses Microsoft’s wireless tracking. Based on my limited demos with both, the Vive Pro certainly seems to be a more sturdy build quality, but that alone is not worth several hundred dollars more, especially when the setup process is so much simpler for Windows Mixed Reality headsets thanks to their inside-out tracking.

HTC fancies itself VR’s premium brand, and while this headset does seem to be the best headset that money can buy on paper. it doesn’t seem to justify this high of a price point when stacked up against the competition already on the market.

Nationwide, 62 percent of the jail population accounts for people who can’t afford bail, according to the Vera Institute of Justice. A lot of these incarcerated individuals are behind bars because they committed crimes at the misdemeanor level or lower. This is a significant statistic from a human rights perspective, as well as an economic one. It costs about $38 million a day to keep these largely nonviolent people behind bars, according to the Pretrial Justice Institute.

This is where Promise, a de-carceration startup that just raised a $3 million round led by First Round Capital with participation from Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, 8VC and Kapor Capital, comes in. Last Father’s Day, Jay-Z penned an op-ed about the bail industry and pre-trial incarceration. He noted how every year, $9 billion is wasted incarcerating people who have not been convicted of crimes.

“We are increasingly alarmed by the injustice in our criminal justice system,” Jay-Z said in a statement. “Money, time and lives are wasted with the current policies. It’s time for an innovative and progressive technology that offers sustainable solutions to tough problems. Promise’s team, led by co-founder and CEO Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, is building an app that can help provide ‘liberty and justice for all’ to millions.”

Promise, which is part of Y Combinator’s current batch of startups, offers counties and local governments an alternative to holding low-risk people behind bars simply because they can’t afford bail.

For each participant, Promise provides counties with a comprehensive intake procedure and then sets up each participant with a care plan specific to them. Promise will then monitor and support participants by helping them ensure they know when they’re supposed to appear in court, and remind them of obligations like drug testing or substance abuse treatment needed. The app also provides participants with job training, housing, counseling and referrals.

“People are going to jail because they look at a piece of paper and misread it, or are going to jail because they can’t afford a class because they’re instead paying child support,” Ellis-Lamkins told TechCrunch.

And many of these people are brown or black. Last year, when Senators Kamala Harris and Rand Paul introduced a bail reform bill, the Pretrial Integrity and Safety Act, they wrote in an op-ed how black and Latinx people are more likely to be detained before trial and less likely able to pay for bail. Senators Harris and Paul pointed to how black and Latino men pay 35 percent and 19 percent higher bail, respectively, than white men.

With Promise, Ellis-Lamkins and her team are using technology to try to create a system that works better for everyone, she said. Instead of a county paying to incarcerate someone simply because they can’t afford to post bail, they can use Promise to monitor compliance with court orders and better keep tabs on people via the app and, if needed, GPS monitoring devices. Counties, courts, case managers and other stakeholders can also access progress reports of individuals to monitor compliance.

Already, Promise is onboarding one county this week and is in talks with another three counties. Instead of a county jail paying $190 per day per person, Ellis-Lamkins said, Promise charges counties just $17 per person per day.

“Our system is built on reducing recidivism,” Ellis-Lamkins said. “Our ideal outcome is the person gets a job, does not reoffend and does not continue in the system.”